Squadron 42: The Briefing Room - Episode 1

10 October 202001:18:402,090 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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From the very start, Chris's remit was he wanted it believable. The whole focus obviously is just on maximum immersion. A lot of assets are kind of unique and locations are unique. Everything really is different. Welcome to the briefing room, a show fully focused on Squadron 42. I'm Brian Chambers, VP of development here at CIG. And today I'm joined by Nick and Ross. So, welcome guys. Uh good to have you on the call. Can you guys uh introduce yourself to everyone? Sure, yep. I'm Nick Elms and I'm the creative director on Squadron 42. And I'm Ross Wilding. I'm the lead level designer on Squadron 42. For those that don't know and because it's it's a little complex on the design side, can
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you can you give a like a high-level breakdown of the design team and how that's how that's made up for for Squadron? The Squadron 42 design team split into three actually. It's three three teams that work very closely with each other. Um first being uh Ross's team, the FPS team, which works predominantly on the ground and gravity-based areas where combat and exploration are a focus. All that other PPU stuff? All the PPU stuff? Yes, that's all the PPU stuff is is is down to Ross. Cool. Um the flight the flight team um work on the sort of space sections of the game as you might expect. Uh that includes like dog fighting, exploration, landing, takeoff, you know, all those kind of stuff. Uh obviously working very closely with the AI various AI feature teams as well. And finally, they've got we've got the social team and they're kind of the glue for all the narrative elements of the game. Uh you know,
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building the interactive experience, presenting it to the player cinematically with, you know, focus on maximum immersion as uh you know, as Chris has sort of called out. Absolutely. And those guys social team's been Everyone's been busy, but the social team I know has put a lot of effort into how you're interacting with Yeah. Absolutely. And and hopefully we'll hear a bit about that later on, but they've got a lot of new tech and things recently to support them, which has been great. Awesome. Awesome. So, Ross, I know you uh you and the team made some really good progress on Assiotto recently. Um I keep seeing the updates and hearing hearing more and more. So, I know we gave you some advance notice and you prepped some stuff to show off. So, I thought maybe you could jump into it and let's see what you got. Sure, let's take a look. This is a decommissioned communication station, which is set inside the Odin system, which is where 90% of um episode 1 takes place. Um we actually visit this
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location very early on in the game and it's probably one of the first times the player gets to kind of be let loose essentially and kind of have a bit of freedom. Um and for this reason, we've decided to basically keep this station quite small. It's it's actually one of the smallest locations we visit in the entire game. Um not to say that it is small because you know, we'll show a little bit more of that in a little bit. Look forward to it. Let's dig in. So, one of the first things we started when um looking at Assiotto was we wanted to kind of establish its identity. So, as you can see here, this is a very early kind of blockout of the exterior, which as you can see looks like a a satellite dish. And this was something that actually came up in one of the early meetings and part of this was because it it gives us that kind of recognizable shape. The other benefit of it, as I've kind of mentioned, this Assiotto is a very early section in the game. We wanted the
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player to kind of have this kind of sandboxy kind of approach. One of the things that this really helps us do is the cylindrical shape means that we can kind of approach it any angle. So, once we could basically kind of finished like planning what the kind of shape was and what the style of the the um the facility was, we basically started focusing on the interior section and Mhm. one of the things that's really important to us as um when we're designing these levels is the functionality and the believability of the space. So, even though we are a sci-fi game, um we're obviously trying to make these spaces like seem as realistic as possible and one of the ways we do that is we look at a lot of um locations in real world spaces and kind of try to find the identity of what this would be and then basically kind of convert that. Obviously, we kind of take some some kind of um creative license with certain things and kind of change things up a
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little bit and add like more sci-fi kind of architecture to things, but it's still very much about the believability and the functionality, which we'll kind of dig down into a little bit more. Yeah. So, the first thing that we actually started looking at was kind of the main functionality of the space and as we kind of said, it's a decommissioned communication center, so um mission control was kind of like a key area for this space. Um so, you can see on this map, we've kind of got like a few of the different locations kind of called out. And what we kind of did is we we kind of focused on the the the key areas first. And then once we kind of established those, we started kind of figure out what other spaces would be in there. So, obviously, we've kind of got this nice skywalk that kind of goes around partway. And again, this kind of like brings us back to the whole trying to
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encourage uh the player to be able to go and explore this space in different directions. So, you can obviously come in there are different entrances. Sometimes you could go left, sometimes you go right, you can go through the middle, you can go up to the higher floors, down into the basement. Yeah. And you can actually see we have a few different shots of this for basically different floors of the station. And then we basically come to um looking at some of the other areas that were initially less important to the space, but we felt would really help with the identity. So, this for example is an early kind of blockout of the habitation area. So, the idea being in here, this would actually be like where the the kind of habitation pods are stored and you can imagine it almost like um I guess like a beehive where it's basically these things kind of plugged into the sides and each person kind of lives
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inside one of these and uh I'm just kind of looking actually if No, so we've got some This is again another kind of screenshot of the um the habitation section, but actually on the outside, so the more kind of living quarters. Mhm. Um And again, this is just another shot from there. Yep, so the thing I was actually looking for and I'll come back to a couple of these in a second, I suppose, but um was actually these was these are the habitation pods basically. So, if you imagine back on that previous shot, um this is actually what would be kind of fixed into those locations. So, if I kind of click back to it a second, you can kind of see that these would nicely fit into these locations. Um And and the area's expandable as well, isn't it? You can add another one underneath if you had more uh more need for habitation. Yeah, it is, yeah. And again, that's the
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kind of again, the kind of idea we was kind of drilling down into the functionality of these spaces is that this is kind of interchangeable and we can kind of like if if the space suddenly needed like more personnel to come and work there, they could basically extend the the size of this quite easily. It's like it's like everything starts in it. It's all sort of fully realized. You know, all the locations and things, they're not just you know, a straight sort of shooter map. Yeah, and this is one of the things that we're kind of driving at is that a lot of what we want to do in Squadron is have a lot of kind of exploration and kind of feel like you're basically behaving how you would behave in these locations as opposed to just, you know, this is a game. I'm obviously going to go in, kill some guys and kind of get to the objective like I just I'm just going down the corridor, I'm looking for where the the objective marker is taking me. Um we really wanted to to so players can kind of start to
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explore these spaces and kind of see how people were living. As you guys are blocking the spaces out, do you guys, you know, once you get in that rough state, are are you actually going in an editor and running around in it to see how it feels at at, you know, as far as scale and distances and and so on at that point? Yes, so we're doing that all the time. So, Yeah. despite like kind of what we're saying is obviously function is a very important thing for us in these blockouts. Another aspect is obviously making sure that it still feels good to kind of traverse and we're kind of sticking to all the metrics and stuff because the last thing we want is to kind of have it make lots of sense, but then not be enjoyable. So, um it's it's always like kind of it takes a lot of time to kind of get that nice balance. Yeah, and I guess another another cog in that balance, too, is, you know, we have an idea of what intended gameplay could be there, right? Cuz
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there's not always a straight line. It's not always we we need you to do A or B. You could do a multitude of things to get through and what you need, but you also have to think about uh the layout and the design and and and what that gameplay means and and the choices the player can make, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. And we we've also got, you know, the things that the uh stimulus that the AI are going to react to anything as well in here. So, if you're in an area where there's no lights, you suddenly switch the lights on, then, you know, you could you could draw the attention of the AI. Uh and that and all that kind of stuff is planned at the stage as well. Yeah, and and that's something we can kind of dig into in a little bit where we basically talk about how we want as much of these environments to be interactive as possible. So, we're basically going through them and you see like terminals and consoles, you should be able to kind of interact with them and kind of you know, read the stuff in there or Yeah, yeah.
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obviously, a lot of the things are going to be kind of physicalized in there, so you can kind of pick them up, throw them around, move them about, do that sort of thing. And all those again will kind of feed back into the kind of sandbox nature of the game. So, you know, like if there's enemies in these spaces, you can actually use them to kind of distract enemies or, you know, even use them as cover and that sort of thing. So, Stealth kill and drag the body away, so you don't you don't get seen. So, this screenshot we're currently on again is is just kind of covering some of the high-level blockout stuff is just as kind of showing that we've kind of got this like skywalk that goes around the outside. And then we also kind of have like the routes into the central section, which is where the mission control is and the server racks and the gravity drive. Um but we're also kind of thinking about other ways that the player can kind of go into these locations. So, this could just kind of shows as you can see, we've
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got like these little storage rooms on the side that lead between, but we've also kind of got these like ventilation systems that feed around the station. Mhm. And the player can actually go into these and then kind of, you know, get like visibility on other areas and kind of again kind of promote a little bit more stealth gameplay if they want to kind of take that approach. That would I guess that would tell me, too, that not all of, you know, those traversal points may be straight in the player's face, right? Exactly, yes. So we we do actually have some that are kind of like effect- effectively what is our like main route or what we kind of craft as our kind of like what we call the golden path. but the idea being that there are kind of like lots of routes and we like the idea that, you know, a lot of players won't even know some of these exist until they even see a video online or someone else that, you know, accidentally stumbles across something and that's what we want to kind of put
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into these levels is as much kind of variety and kind of stuff that keeps figuring out and like learning new things as you kind of play again and again. Giving more kind of replay options. Cool. So moving on to the some of the next images we have. We This is when we basically started to get a a lot more involved. So we'd kind of we'd established what the kind of space was, what the point of it was. We obviously know what the intended kind of gameplay is for the space. Um So at this point we kind of talk to art and kind of say like how we this is what we want. How do we kind of portray that? So here you can see like one screenshot like a a kind of piece of concept art. You can obviously see like a few different doors and why this is obviously important is
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because it also kind of gives us the the identity and the the architecture of the space which Yeah. Apart aside from the obvious um from the branding perspective, we also do this because the architecture will obviously play an important part in the blockout as well. So if the walls aren't straight, for example, that obviously affects lines of sight like you know, the kind of how you kind of feed into the rooms. and the window affects things as well. Exactly, yes. So you can just kind of see the two here. To that point, I I I've actually found that fairly it's incredibly interesting when you look at different levels and different manufacturers and so on throughout the game. And to that point with the different architecture and the style, right? Um it lends itself to have a certain feel within certain areas which then lends itself to even certain types
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of gameplay and so on. So it's it's cool to see the spread that's out there and the level of detail that and attention that's put to each thing. Even like, you know, the habs architecture matching, you know, the doors and and so on. I was going to say it's interesting you have the Asciado uh it also sort of manufactures some of the comms relays in the Odin system as well and you kind of got that architecture echoing through those obviously in a sort of scaled down state because those things are are largely unmanned apart from you know, the odd engineer. Um so yes, like you said, you know, the manufacturers play a big part in this. Yeah, and another thing as well is like the architecture is very important just because like for example with Asciado, it's obviously a cylindrical shape. So what this also means is like what you can do in the game is you can obviously go to a a terminal and you can actually download map schematics to your mobiglass, but um if say you didn't know to do that or
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you didn't want to do that, you obviously want to kind of encourage like little kind of things in the environment that encourage the player to kind of figure out where to go or kind of, you know, where try and figure out where they are in the space. So having this kind of cylindrical shape that almost like gets like the left wall or the inside wall is always the smaller of the two. Um that certainly helps us kind of like establish this sort of stuff and when we also look at the branding as well, we actually have several locations across the game where they are, you know, kind of like they're different locations, but they're branded by the same kind of company. So it helps us kind of identify certain elements as well and kind of give like level of familiarity to um certain things. So here we just have some more again, some more concepts um this time of the kind of the controls and the terminals. Like again with Asciado being
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a communication center, the the mission control stuff was very important to us. So this was one of the very early kind of concepts that we did. Here you can start to see like very early 3D versions of them which were actually placed into our environments. And this is kind of like somewhere between like early white box and kind of moving towards like having their first pass on the space. Mhm. Again, you can just kind of see a bit more this you can clearly see obviously the lighting outside has had a bit more attention at this point. Again, few more consoles. Just kind of showing their, you know, relationship into the actual space. And then here we can kind of see that once we've kind of established kind of like the main kind of architecture for certain things, one of the things art will go away and do is start to kind of build like kit
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pieces what you can see here. So these are like essentially um pieces of corridor or like strips and doorways and stuff that we can then take and kind of like go over our white box sections and basically build them to have more more of an identity to them. So when we actually go into our spaces, we do obviously try to consider the the shape and the architecture as much as possible very early on. But once art kind of come in and give us that initial pass as well, we very instantly see like the the shape and the identity of the space really come to life basically. So finally, we have this this basically this comparison that kind of shows like blockouts of the the initial space and then ultimately what they've turned into in the final version or at least you know, our final art pass.
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as you can see in some of these sections, the the final art is very true to the the original blockout which is obviously something we try to do because once it's in blockout, we we're obviously testing a lot. We're kind of play playing certain areas and seeing if things work, puzzles kind of make sense. So kind of trying to trace over that as much as possible is quite an important factor for us because we can kind of get a good feeling for how it's going to play before we kind of sink too much art and resource time into the final version. So yeah, you can kind of see here that this up until this point is very kind of close to what we actually had. Yeah, it's really interesting seeing the main the main shapes, if if you will, you know, still exist and then with that next pass getting that further
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level of detail, you get more of the visual identity that's in there. You get more of the the sense of how the space will feel per se with with adding color and lighting and and atmosphere and so on. Exactly, and super regular syncs with the art guys obviously. The designers works off you know, very closely with the art team. Yeah, and the again like the lighting plays a huge part. Like in some cases, these are actually you know, there's not much more art and detail in the the final version. It's just a lot of it is kind of done with lighting as well which makes a huge difference. Yeah. Um So something you can kind of see in like the second half of this video actually is that not all locations are kind of like as true to the blockout in the final version. Um and part of this is because for one reason or another as we kind of tested stuff, we've just felt
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that it you know, it wasn't quite right and we've wanted to kind of change and address certain features. So you can see here for example, the the initial blockout space was quite wide. And we wanted to kind of funnel the player and try and encourage them a little bit less to use this main route and perhaps use more of a kind of stealthy approach if they wanted to enter the space which we're kind of moving into now. Um and again, you can kind of see that this space is quite claustrophobic, quite mechanical heavy and then in the final version, we've kind of we've opened it up to kind of have like light from outside kind of filtering a little bit more and just kind of make it a bit more breathable basically. Now when some of those decisions are made then it's I know it's a it's an iterative process, but it's about getting in and reviewing and understanding what the main goals are and looking at the architecture and and the mood and the lighting and all
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those things coming together. Yeah, basically. I mean that's a large combination of it. And in some cases as I said, it's kind of gameplay driven and the fact that it's like oh well this doesn't actually work for what we hoped. And in which case we'll go in and we'll change it. And in other cases, it's just we've blocked something out and it like again, when we're kind of doing it very early on like the art guys have gone in now that they've obviously got a lot more reference material and stuff. So there'll be some cases where like a shape just doesn't quite work for a believable space. And in those cases, we basically say okay, well we need to change the layout a little bit to kind of accommodate. And narratively, we pretty much cater for you know, what the player does as well. So you know, if the player goes in there all guns blazing then you know, the whole base is going to be on alert. If you go stealthy then maybe you get to pick up tidbits of information here and
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there. Which is especially if you're in like a a crawl space or something like that. Yeah. No, that's really cool seeing you know, that gives everyone a glimpse of kind of the history of it, right? And you know, I I do remember seeing early early sketches I think on a whiteboard on paper of what it could look like and it was very close to that first satellite image that that you showed. Yeah, so I think obviously we've kind of shown a little bit of the kind of early stuff. So I think what we can actually do now is bring up the the level in the editor. Okay, so this is basically Asciado inside the editor. Um as you can kind of see where it's based in system. We've got a nice backdrop of the coil over here. Um and again, you can kind of see as we kind of approach a little bit more the kind of satellite dish style that we were going for. Mhm. So right now, the
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petals are kind of like tucked into each other, but I believe these can all actually fold out. Uh wait, wait. Are we going in live? We're going in live, yeah. We're going in live, okay. Hold on, Nick. Any anything could happen. I know, that's cool. It's Yeah, it's awesome. So one of the things before I actually drop into the actual lower levels is I wanted to kind of show a little bit of the on the top of the the dish essentially. So um something we'll kind of get into in a little bit in a minute is the a lot of the entrances or most of the entrances we've kind of designed are on the on the side of the dish. And this was a kind of conscious choice that we made because um I believe in the blockout video we showed slightly earlier, we actually had like this crow's nest for example, with a hidden entrance in the top that would allow you to come down.
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But we felt it was just a little bit too obscure and a little bit out of the way, so we basically removed it and kind of changed that location. Um but something that's really kind of cool in these um this location is basically you can actually get out of your ship at this point. You could obviously EVA up close to these windows. And you would actually see like the the AI kind of walking around in here and you could kind of like move around, plot kind of where some of these enemies are and then just basically figure out how you going to tackle this situation. You can do that, yeah. Draw a little happy face if it's foggy outside, you know. Yep. Yep. Just breathe on the glass and then dive you realize you've not got your helmet on, so So yeah, so the main kind of aspect of this is the underside essentially of
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um Assiado, so you can kind of again see the the sort of circular nature of the the shape of the space. Um again, the the player has kind of like they can get out of their ship, they can fly their ship around here, they have like full freedom to kind of explore this place as they want to. Um One of the things we wanted to kind of do is have like a few kind of key entrances, so the thing that we will kind of call out as part of the mission flow is the the hangar. Um and that that's kind of like what we're kind of drafting as the the main entrance into the space and that's also how typically people using this space would enter and exit this this area. Mhm. Um but we also have a couple of extra route if you're going to go the stealth route. No, well, exactly, yeah. So obviously when we kind of go into the hangar, um we would have kind of, you know, enemies or like characters in there just kind of
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loading off vehicles and kind of like flying them in and out. So if you're trying to avoid being kind of spotted in this space, then like I said, that going into a hangar isn't really a good option. Yeah. Um So one of the locations we actually do have, and I'll I'll slow down the movement a little bit, is is this. So as I kind of mentioned previously, we have the um we had the crow's nest, which didn't really work um especially because it was so long, so we actually now have this kind of mini I suppose it's like a reverse crow's nest um we You can actually fly up here. Um and again, you kind of like a little a little door, come inside, we have an airlock here you can go you're you're space walking, aren't you, at that point? You've left your ship. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So this would all be an EVA. You would come into here, you'd cycle the um the air and gravity.
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At this point, you could kind of then enter into this space, which basically brings us into the server room. So we'll come back to this space. Um but for now, I wanted to kind of zoom back out. And I wanted to show the habitation area. So when we were kind of looking at the blockout images before, you could kind of see this sort of space and like I said, the kind of honeycomb beehive shape. Um if we kind of fly in, we're going to lower my movement. We kind of look down into this space now. You can kind of see that it's absolutely open. Arted up and there's a bunch of these that are kind of some of them are closed and kind of sealed up for the outside, so that they're saying that there may not be habitation pods attached at this point, but Mhm. additional ones could be added at any time and then the doors are
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opened up. Um and then we also have some that are actually in here. And we actually have, you know, like people starting to kind of have like their personal effects and so on and we can kind of see if we zoom in a little bit. Try and get the the camera up nice and close. You can kind of see almost like people's kind of like staff rosters and stuff and to an extent like on the side. Yep. So something like it's a good thing to point out to, you know, to that level. You know, we build things that have functionality, right? So as you guys are building this from the ground up, you know, the these the screens, the consoles, and so on, they they serve a purpose. They majority of them could be interactable. Um you know, they'll be cause and effect. You'll push Yeah. Everything there, I mean, if like the
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gravity room that that Ross sort of touched on before, you know, any structure like this has got gravity in it, it'll have a generator, you know, you can potentially go down, you know, switch it off, whatever, and then and there's cause and effect. It's like everything in the game, you know, it's it's all um sort of based on um you know, a a sort of reality that we have for Star Citizen. Yeah, and we've even got like um posted notes and you know, you know, maybe these are like codes for um lock safes or something that we have lying around or maybe they're just You know that's a you know that's some like artist's personal PIN code or or hidden message, right? Yeah, exactly, yeah. It's very likely. Secret Morse code. Um so now I just have to try and remember which is the right door out of here. So I think it's it's this one.
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So this kind of brings us out into the main kind of living quarters of the the station. So again, like they they would obviously kind of socialize and kind of have like meals and stuff in other areas cuz as you can kind of tell, the the habitation pods aren't aren't very big. Um maybe obviously if people want quiet time and stuff, but for the most part, I would kind of expect people to kind of come into these mess halls and again, you can start to see that as you said, kind of half-eaten meals of kind of people have been prepping stuff it's been kind of abandoned. So one of the things with blood on it from a xenomorph or anything that's come out of anyone's chest or anything, I hope. No, no nothing like that just yet, but Not yet. know. And one of the things like right now, obviously a lot of these props are just
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kind of like placed in there, but we imagine that when players kind of come into these spaces, that a lot of these things will be kind of physicalized and you can actually pick them up, obviously, Yeah. throw things around the room. Um there'll obviously be certain things to kind of interact with, things to read. You can kind of see over here like people have been playing cards. Sure you can obviously pick cards up and the baseball bat and so on. Um Let's see where this leads us. So basically once we kind of come away from the habitation, we start to move in towards what is essentially the the skywalk. Um I'm I'll actually take this So we kind of saw some of this in the the video very early on. Um And as you can see, it's, you know, it does look very clean and like there's obviously some
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um stuff that's been kind of stacked up One of the things we're still kind of in the process of doing is kind of adding dressing to some of these elements, so you can kind of see like we will be kind of adding more kind of elements into these rooms and spaces and part of that is something that will change and it will be an ongoing process very very close until release. And that's because basically we'll be in here, we'll obviously be working, we'll have AI like running around and they're going into combat and we want to kind of get the balance right, so there's a nice kind of level between these. Yeah. This is all traversable by the player right now, yeah? Yeah, so like I said, this is obviously in editor, so if I um hit control G, for example, I'm I'm actually in game now, so I think you switched the AI layer off, so we're not in into a world of chaos.
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Yeah, so So right now, this is just kind of like it as it's kind of intended like from a visual and artistic standpoint. Obviously the level is fully traversable and doors all work and everything, so if I come down here, um but one of the things, yeah, is that we're obviously kind of AI is an ongoing process and you know, like obviously live demoing it at this point, like anything could happen, so we're just trying to save ourselves a little bit of pain right now from um showing too much stuff, basically, but you can again kind of come into there, you can see a lot of these kind of um like personal effects and things that kind of add to the kind of life of the space. Um I think you've got like more kind of random codes and stuff that the they artists have been putting on the
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whiteboards. Obviously, be curious to see what's on them in the the final game, but and then we kind of move in like this is the kind of the server room, for example. That's kind of what I said before about the tele- telecom exchanges, they've got an inspiration of from those, really. They look really cool, but futurized. Yeah. And these spaces, you know, it it does look very really cool and one of the other things that we're quite keen on for a lot of these spaces, as I briefly touched on, is we want to have a lot of kind of interactables and kind of things to do in the environment. So if you imagine you're kind of sneaking through this space and it's obviously very kind of like there are enemies in here and you're trying to avoid them cuz you want to take a stealth approach, something either you could do or the AI
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could actually do is actually come over to one of these terminals and then kind of interact with some of the screens and then basically like get access to these server racks and you could actually interact with them and then have them kind of lower into the floor. And suddenly what becomes like a nice place for kind of sneaking around with the stealth suddenly can become totally exposed with no kind of cover. Exactly. And the player can kind of use that to their advantage and equally AI can use that to the player's disadvantage, so Yeah, it's like I said before, those those things will become a stimulus for AI, so even if somebody's in the room next door, you know, they might potentially hear that, going, "Yeah, what the hell's going on next door?" Exactly, yeah. Check out. And speaking of next door, I I guess as a player, that would that would make me mad if I think I'm being all stealthy and
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I I flag the AI hear me, next thing you know, you know, all my cover disappears through the ground or so. heavy machinery on in the room next door, it's not Yeah, that's it. And and this is the thing as well is that and this is kind of what moves into our steps as we kind of move forward towards release, basically, is that's we're trying to basically get the AI to kind of do stuff that kind of feels like cool and original and obviously like compelling to the kind of experience, but at the same time not kind of like the player thinks they're doing okay and they're like perfectly stealthing around and then suddenly everything disappears. So, um if we just kind of move back into this room, for example, you know, maybe like a guy is kind of working on, let's say the terminal that's over here. Um he comes over, you know, maybe he's got his back turned to you and he's kind of like he's he's working on here and then he lowers just one or two of these terminals, but
00:30:19
let's say you're kind of sneaking up behind him and then suddenly the thing you plan to use as backup cover disappears. It then, because he's got his back to you, it gives you a couple of seconds to kind of go, "Okay, well, I'm going to hide behind this one instead." Yeah. As opposed to just, you know, or you could obviously kind of try and take him out quickly. and this is again something that kind of we feed into with our our next kind of step, which is obviously kind of balancing the AI out and trying to find out like how much noise is too much. Um because something else that we want to do is like in this environment, for example, I would expect it to be quite noisy like just in general, so Yeah. we actually want it to be so that noise in an environment affects how noisy the player can be. So, if you're obviously kind of in an engineering kind of space and there's a lot of machinery
00:31:06
going on around you, you would expect the player to kind of be able to walk around fairly normally and not, you know, be detected or kind of be heard. Whereas if we're kind of in a space that's like really quiet and like you can hear every footstep, we would expect the AI to kind of pay attention to you a lot easier. Um So, it's it's also like reading Sorry. I was going to say even if you've blown your cover, I mean, the AI don't all sort of run after you like, you know, a football team or whatever. Uh you know, that if he if he if he know you, they'll they'll um sort of hunker down and uh you know, take take sort of ambush places and things like that. So, uh you know, the whole focus is on the AI being believable in these spaces. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. And um and that's something we'll kind of cover actually in a little bit um when we talk a little bit more about the the plans for the AI and stuff. But here we can actually see the the
00:31:55
gravity room and this is basically the the gravity drive that's essentially kind of powering all the gravity inside the the station and when we're kind of talking about like interactions and stuff as well, this is quite cool because if we come into here, um we can actually come to like this is intended to be like one of the main kind of terminals for the entire station that kind of controls a lot of the power elements. Um and something if I actually go this way, kind of move back through the space. I think the door sealed actually because it's um this is the airlock, so I can actually cheat since we're in editor and kind of fly down. You can actually see that this is the kind of secret crow's nest that I was talking about earlier. players were to kind of sneak in this way, they can actually get
00:32:42
like a kind of quick early access to um these sections, basically. And again, if you know, if if a player comes up to some of these locations and doesn't think or doesn't want to try and interact with these terminals, that's that's totally up to them and that's, you know, will affect their experience, but for somebody who wants to kind of try and find out another way of doing something, like maybe you can interact with this and then you could probably shut down the power for like 90% of the the station or, you know, um we're still kind of figuring out what happens like oxygen levels and so on, so that's a potential, maybe. Um That's cool. That just open That opens up so many different avenues as far as how you approach things and and, you know, again, as I said earlier, cause and effect, right? Um Exactly, yeah. present these play spaces, you know, for
00:33:31
the for the players and they can sort of, you know, solve you know, almost all of them in in any way they they want to within the sort of environment, you know, with with the sort of systems and tools that we've spent, you know, long time developing. Yeah. And this is where the fun fun part comes in towards the end of development where we're we're basically trying to, you know, all the all these kind of systems come together and we're we're basically trying to make them work without cause like just causing infinite problems for the player. Exactly. Yeah. Or or the AI It's not It's not an easy thing to sort, right? There's so many different variables that that you need to balance and and some intentionally you don't balance, right? Cuz what stops somebody from, you know, guns blazing going in as loud and dirty as they can versus, you know, somebody who wants to do it stealth or somebody who rides the middle. I mean, it's cool. Each Each one becomes its
00:34:20
unique experience if in a sense. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And just kind of again kind of moving around the station as we've kind of seen the the skywalks earlier, so this is actually the other side and something that um I kind of talked about at the very start was the fact that Axiom is a kind of like decommissioned communications station and obviously everything I've shown up to this point is kind of operational and kind of lights on and everything's working, so um you can actually see here that this side of the station is a lot more kind of in darkness and it's kind of been left to kind of rot, essentially. I was going to say it looks like they need they need a good mopping on this side, you know? It's cool having the tarpaulins and the sheets and things over uh over everything as well. Yeah, and this is something as well that
00:35:07
helps us kind of kind of going back to what I was saying about the the AI in these spaces and kind of talking about um like the player understanding where they are. So, like from here, obviously aside from the fact you can you've got this really nice kind of vista looking here outside, like just kind of looking at the shot, it's quite obvious where the middle of the station is as opposed to the outside. Correct, yeah. though because you've just got the kind of the smaller radius on the inside, Mhm. um but this kind of decommissioned side also kind of gives us the opportunity to basically distinguish the two different sides of the walkway. Um So, like here, for example, we can obviously this is clearly a a different side to the station from the the the skywalk that's in, you know, decent condition.
00:35:55
So, there there are a kind of multitude of reasons for why we we have things like this. It's cool. It's really cool to see No, it's it's really cool to see the progress. I haven't I I haven't seen it uh the walk-through to this extent for a while and and last time I did it it definitely wasn't this far along. Yeah, and like even, you know, from someone who kind of works on these levels day in day out, like you kind of forget a lot of things cuz you're working on a in a kind of vacuum or a bubble about, you know, the spaces that you're in and then every now and then you see something like, "Oh my god, this is actually, you know, really cool." Like, I mean, again, just kind of like the visuals on this. Like, this is kind of in editor. This is me playing it in real time, so Yeah. it's not kind of, you know, faked in any way. Um it's really cool. And again,
00:36:44
like if I just kind of fly out, you can like even with the character still in game, you you pretty much you can see everything, essentially. And just to clarify, I I do have god mode on as well, so That's why I'm not suddenly suffocating. I I kept seeing it pop up, so talking about your med pen, so I I assumed earlier on you were in god mode. No, it's great to see the progress, though. It's It's really cool and it's, you know, it becomes a little bit of a I guess for everyone a little bit of a history lesson, right? As far as the progress that leading up to where we are today on this. That's cool. And and another thing that which obviously we're we're not going to be showing anything of this today, but um we do have like some environments which are like infinitely bigger than this sort of location. So, you can imagine
00:37:33
like the the kind of work that goes into a space that's this size. Yeah. Think of something that's sat on an entire planet, for example. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Um and that's that's the other thing that we really want to do in Squadron as well is kind of make everything like handcrafted. Like we don't want things to be kind of very procedural. Like we're we're really trying to even down to like the art and the way we're kind of tackling stuff is it's very much like locations are unique. So, rather than kind of saying, "Oh, here's like a base core set of assets and we're going to kind of reuse them with a few hero assets kind of thrown in every now and then." We're really trying to make every space like its own kind of identity and and you're not going to get like halfway through the game and suddenly go, "Oh, I've seen that that prop or that crate in, you know, like 15 levels already." everything really is different.
00:38:21
Yeah. Yeah, you'll recognize architectures though, but Yeah, the attention to detail, I mean, you can always, you know, I've always been surprised year after year and and and what we're doing and how we're pushing and and where we're pushing, but I think in the end it it all it all pays off, right? You you have this sense of believability of putting the focus in it in these accurate play spaces and on top of that if if we can have that sense of, you know, every single asset being handcrafted, I think it just adds more and more to that realism and and believability of the player in interacting in that space. That's cool. Exactly. So, Good stuff. the thing I was going to also show was um just the basically how we're kind of like working on the next step and again, without kind of like showing the AI too much kind of playing in the game, um I wanted to kind of
00:39:09
basically bring up uh some map stuff and how we kind of tackle kind of like working out where the AI is going to go. So, you can see in this screenshot, this is kind of a like a an isometric kind of angle of the the station where you can kind of see the different tiers. You can actually see um part of habitation here. We We don't actually have That gravity room right in the center is where we just were, right? Exactly, yeah, just down there, yeah. Um and then this is the kind of the mission control section. Um we do actually have the hangar off to the left um and this the reason why this isn't here is because we're still kind of like making some tweaks to the hangar, so we're still kind of like finalizing some of the areas and that. but then if we kind of cycle through again, you can kind of see That disk is the skywalk, is it? Yeah. Yeah, it is, yeah. So, um you can kind
00:39:57
of see as we've already kind of covered, you know, there are three main kind of tiers to the station. Um and then what we do is we essentially break it up into uh zones. So, you can see here we've kind of got like uh zone one, which is the kind of green side, and then the which this would basically be like the the regular skywalk that we've seen. Um and then zone three over here, for example, is like the decommissioned skywalk, and then you've also got habitation over here. Um zone two is the engineering stuff, and again, the gravity section with the server rooms. And then we've got kind of zone four, which is like the the very top deck and the kind of mission control section. Um and the reason why we we kind of break these up is something that kind of Nick touched on earlier was um actually for AI and how they kind of like behave in
00:40:46
the environment. So, for example, we were toying around with like AI placement, so this was just this is in no way kind of like the final plan. This was just like a recent kind of iteration of what we would have done to kind of plan out like AI patrols, how you know, the sort of behaviors that we want them to have. Um and for example, we would say that say say in zone one you kind of approach this character and they spot you and they're an enemy. Um they would probably obviously alert their their team teammates. What would then happen is these three guys would kind of move over and kind of support them in combat, and suddenly the player is like one versus four, for example. Um but what we wouldn't want to happen is everyone in the station to run to this point. Um and that is for obvious reasons, basically. But
00:41:34
Yeah. I mean, aside from that, like it it's just not realistic. Like if if something was to happen somewhere, like often than not, like if the security on a certain location, you would expect a couple of guys to go and check it out as opposed to you know, the whole force to kind of go and check a certain area and then leave the rest of the station exposed, basically. Could it ever get elevated though that, you know, zone one's trying to handle it, and then just for proximity, zone four could zone four or zone three join in, right? If it gets certain amount of you know, craziness, if it's if it's really loud and and stuff's blowing up, and and those audible cues, you know? So, so that's something we're still kind of like experimenting with at the moment, but what might be nice, for
00:42:20
example, is if it say again, you're in here, you kind of fight these guys and Yeah. it's like down to the last man, and he's kind of on his own and he's struggling, you know, maybe he radios for support, and then in that case we could say the nearest kind of next zone Yeah. is basically requesting help. Um and then something else which we've not kind of decided yet for this location, for example, but something we may do in other locations is if an enemy or a group of enemies are struggling, perhaps they call in uh like dropship support, and then you have an extra wave of enemies could kind of actually come to the location. And in that case, we can obviously kind make things more difficult for the player, so That's cool. Yeah, could end up with enemies coming in from behind him that he thought he'd already dealt with. Exactly. And um again, like we obviously need to we're kind of working on some of the systems
00:43:08
at the moment, but there will be systems that will also allow players to kind of like, you know, give themselves a little bit more of an advantage to kind of tackling some of these situations as well. That's a lot. That's that's chunky. We've been talking for a while. That's really No, it's really cool to see the progress, though. Um how how are how are you and the team feeling about it so far? About, you know, where it's been and how it's come and and where you're at. It to be honest, it it's like at the moment I feel like everyone's starting to get quite excited about everything because it's obviously in the past we've when you're kind of in blockout, and especially when you're developing a new game that's kind of the tech is kind of moving along with it at the same time. Um there's a lot of kind of unknowns, and you're kind of planning and you're putting kind of setting things up with the assumption of how something's going to work. Yeah. Um but we're kind of past that first hurdle, and we're kind of getting into the stage now where it's
00:43:55
kind of like we know what the spaces are. We've obviously been developing them for a while. Yep. Now we we know what the mechanics are, and they're starting to come online, and Plus we've got some gorgeous art as well now to run around, which which always really helps. Yeah, so much space. That's cool. I mean, yeah, it's obviously stunning, and um the thing like I'm I'm most grateful for this uh for this video is I can take all the credit for the for the artwork that's been shown. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time, Russ. I know you and the team are all all busy. Like I said, I keep saying it's it's really good to see the progress. I'm I'm glad you had time to pull some stuff together so we could show it off to everyone. Yeah, no, it's it's great to show. Yeah, thanks, Russ. Yeah, see you later. Uh as you said it right at the top of the the show, um the social team have got some some good progress that they've
00:44:43
made on on the Interop Tech, and I think we're going to bring Phil in, aren't we, to to chat through that and show us some more videos? Hey, guys. Hey, how you doing, Phil? Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. I've uh I've been lurking for the last half hour, so That was great. Yeah. And you showed some of that. Yeah, hard act to follow. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us. Uh for those that don't know you, can you can you introduce yourself to everyone? Yeah, my name's Philip Mellor, and I'm uh lead design on a S42. And then my current focus has been on Interop Tech. Awesome. So, I assume I assume Yes, I was just going to say, "Hey, what do you want to show off today?" But I assume you're going to jump in Interop Tech, so let's go for it. Um well, yeah, I'll talk you through. Start of the S social team have been doing a big push on scene
00:45:30
implementation. So, at the end of kept to the uh end of last year, most of our scenes were in. But they were in a in a base fashion. So, basically, the with the scenes, the player has to play ball, and you know, if the player does anything, the scenes kind of they kind of fall apart, really. So, um the big push is on the interstitials. That's the Idris Stanton. The Stanton being the the player's base ship for a good chunk of the game. So, um I'll give you a bit of background on the actual Stanton. It's um it's a military variant of the Idris. Uh it's got two ship complement of two Gladiuses, um 80-person crew, which is a lot more than the standard Idris crew, so that's that's 80 people to interact with, and it's not just um it's not just faceless crew, you know, everyone's got a personality on the ship.
00:46:17
Is that 80 including yourself? Okay. 80 included. Yeah, so that's engineers, deck crew, bridge crew, Yeah, yeah. medical, utility, you name it, they're all there. From the very start, Chris's remit was he wanted it believable, you know. He didn't want to you know, the usual usual tropes of we do the scene when you interact with someone, you know, it's it's an easy trap to fall into. You cut to a third-person camera, or you funnel them you'll you'll shepherd them into a certain area, then you'll lock them in. Chris didn't want that. No, that was his remit from the start. I don't want that. So, that was a it's it's quite the challenge, so it all starts off with the uh script. So, Dave and Will, they had to go and when they're writing the script, they had to keep in mind we needed opportune points during conversations that the
00:47:07
player could intervene or break out of or abandon. So, that had to be in mind. So, that was a challenge for them, and then they had to write the it was wild lines after that. So, that's they had to give us lines which could play out um when the player was doing this, you know, so in the middle of conversation, player walks away, they have to give us wild lines like pretty much every character. Um you know, "Where you going? What are you doing? Hey, you, I thought we were talking." So, that that Yeah, yeah. And then it was um Sorry, Nick. I was going to say the whole focus, obviously, is just on maximum immersion, isn't it? I mean, that's, you know, that's been Chris's remit from from day one that, you know, you you you've got to feel that you're actually part of the crew on there, and uh you you're not some disembodied ghost or whatever that can float around, and uh uh you know, see things on the ship. Everyone Everyone reacts to you depending on what you do. Even you're
00:47:55
not actually part of. Yeah, no, definitely a big challenge, but um and I was looking forward to it, yeah, cuz I'm not a fan of it where you get locked in. You know, nothing worse than walking around a location terrified of being dragged into a conversation. So, um yeah, I was looking forward to this to this a lot. so, moving on, P-Cap. So, when Chris and Hannes did the P-Cap, they had to I I Yeah, it must have been tough cuz they had to keep in mind, again, you know, along with the script, they had to give us opportune points to break in and out. So, you know, they can't have actors monologuing and gesticulating too much, you know. Otherwise, it'd make life all good for us. Yeah, I was there I was there during some of the early P-Cap shoots, and and I do remember some of these. And this was before the system was was even mature.
00:48:43
And it was it was already in Chris's head, and the writers knew exactly what they were doing, and you would you'd see some of our our top talent just reiterating different lines and variations, and Yeah, it must have been tough because you're crystal balling, aren't you? A little bit, yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's so so many hours of P-Cap, you know, because of the of these sequences. Oh, yeah. mean, but ultimately, that goal was to get it together, as you say, so you're not locked into a conversation, as Nick said. So, so you get that extra level and sense of immersion when you're interacting with with NPCs wherever you are throughout the game, right? Yeah, definitely, yeah. Um so, you conversate Yeah, you can pretty much you can attack a scene from any angle if you wish. Mhm. And then you then you're not locked in,
00:49:31
you can do what you want during the scene, you know. You're you're not dragged in there, you can actually back off, you can 180 and the AI will it will react. You'll see in the video later. Yeah, I mean some of the reviews we've had you know we've had people sort of running over laughing at the at the amount of trolling cuz obviously you know you can start talking to someone and then start backing away and they've got to react to like you know what the hell are you doing? Where where you what? That kind of thing and and laughs in the room are great. Yeah, no it's cool you can do it for hours. Hours of fun doing this. I well I think I I I hope people aren't going to play the game completely doing that. No, no but you but if you want to you can. No, no only if you're a jackass like me you can do it but it's funny cuz cuz of the personalities on the ship you can single out certain personalities who rub you up the wrong way. You know there's like abrasive characters. So with those guys you can you can be rude,
00:50:19
you can back off, you can do all of that. You can do You fall foul of the reputation system though if you do that. You can you can upset people too much. You'll take a hit but but with some of those characters on the ship it's well worth it. But uh yeah so moving on with it I'm just I'm rambling about the stages but it's just the feel you went down to the implementation side. So we have the scene as a the end of last year we had the scene in game. So then we have to we have to do like a a real focus pass on what we need to do. So um this uh interrupt points. So you can have an ongoing conversation. Two characters are talking and then player can barge in there and at certain certain points within that conversation they can break out and engage with you. So that's a challenge so you have to find certain points where you know you're not you're not Yeah, this is a conversation you're not even involved in. I mean it's two other people in the huddle talking and then you go and like lurk next to
00:51:07
them and they've got they've got to look at you and reference you believably. Exactly, yeah, yeah. And obviously you know that maintain the performance as well. So there's a lot of work in that. And hence hence the term interrupt tech, right? Yes. Well, interrupt tech but that's a part of it, yeah. So then we have So then it would like uh for example's sake you interrupt the conversation then during that conversation you have a break points. And that's points throughout the conversation where you can you can potentially back off, you can 180. Just it just kind of break off from the conversation and they have to adapt to that. So then they'll that's when a the wild lines kick in. You know like oh you got somewhere to be? You then That's rude. That kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah yeah there's all sorts, yeah. But then you the player's given opportunity to kind of rejoin or kind of abandon, you know? And if you rejoin the
00:51:56
NPC's got to pick up the conversation and if you abandon, you know, the NPC's got to go back to pretty much what you gesticulate and go oh what the hell? Like I guess you don't want to talk. Then they go back to what they were doing. And some of the cool ones I've seen when we've reviewed these uh recently are those ones when they do get picked back up, right? Like close to you know somebody has their conversation between two people, I walk in, they they acknowledge me and they turn to me, oh hey, I remember that thing and they start telling me a story and I back away. They tell me a line, I then come forward again and they're like, okay, all right. So let me pick it right back up. And it is it's I I think as far as the tech that's there and and and I know it's not the easiest thing to do but when they're put together the way they're intended to be they're seamless. Yeah, I mean that's
00:52:44
super hard for the actors. You don't see you don't see yeah. You don't see hitches from the from the the animation, you don't see this, you don't see that. It just it it flows and it feels really natural which is really cool. Yeah, well that's it people spotted it straight away. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if if if it's if you do it clunky it's kind of yeah you'll spot it. But And there's the challenge Chris and the and and you know the writers when they were doing the peak out for these things you have to maintain the intonation and you know it does feel seamless. It doesn't it doesn't feel Yeah. jarring too much. Absolutely. So what do you have to show us then? So this is Maro, everyone's favorite engineer. So he's like the ship's gossip, you know? Every time you stumble across these guys he's gossiping about something. So in the start conversation we have two interrupt points which I spoke about before. That's breaking into a conversation. Then he turns his
00:53:32
attention to you and then we have during the following conversation we have five break points. And that's a pause, resume, abandon points. So you can do either of those. And then we also have the performance based to the left and to the right. So you can pretty much you can attack this from any angle if you want. That's cool. Just to be fair to the character department we should say that the character models in this are the the basic versions prior to all the sort of lovely polish that they lavish. So yeah. Yeah, we all we we always hate giving disclaimers but you know things are always being pushed on but but yeah they I don't think they are the most up to date. I heard this video may have a a little bit of length but it you know it shows the variety that we have and and and although it it may even be a little
00:54:20
bit repetitive sometimes with with the line that's there again it shows those angles, it shows the timing and and so on. So it's you know I think it's worth worth people seeing the variety that's there. Yeah, it's it's a lengthy video and you know the Groundhog Day in there but it that's the whole point of it. It shows it shows all the different scenarios we've catered for. You know this is for a just this just for a single scene. Yeah, the level of complexity that there has to be depending on the approaches. Awesome, let's watch it. Yeah, yeah. There you go guys. I'll kill the share screen. Yeah, the entire face completely rebuilt afterwards. Ah, Lieutenant, congrats on the big first mission. Exciting stuff. Lieutenant, you all right? Right, where was I?
00:55:09
It must be great to finally feel like a real pilot. And not that you weren't a real pilot before but now you've actually done something without blowing up. Never mind, I guess. Yeah, the entire face completely rebuilt Apparently Lieutenant looked completely different before Vega. first mission. Exciting stuff. It must be great to finally feel like a real pilot. And not that you weren't a real pilot before but now you've actually done something without Speaking of pilots, did you hear what
00:55:58
happened to Ashitaka last year? Tom, we were posted down in some backwater system I I forget which one. Maybe next. Anyway, we decided to go drinking at this dump of a trade station. Real dump. Ashitaka is completely ripped. I mean
00:57:06
she's she's totaled. To say it's a face could do with a bit of an upgrade. Wakes up the next morning with a nose like the front of Freelancer. afterwards. Apparently Lieutenant looked completely different before Vega. could do with a bit of an upgrade.
00:58:05
Wakes up the next morning with a nose like the front of Freelancer. Doc said she couldn't fix it. Said she wouldn't fix something that isn't broken. she's she's totaled.
00:59:09
To say it's a face could do with a bit of an upgrade. Ashitaka had to walk around with that disaster for a month before she got some more short leave. I sent it to me London. Anyway, I'll catch you later. Well, that was pretty cool. I mean, it showed off it showed off the variety. You you you see the nuances in between it, right? Yeah. It's kind of like if if you didn't know that it was a system that existed with all these angles, you know, you could look at the video and
00:59:55
say, "Wow, it's you know, really repetitive or this and that." But again, it shows off that variety. I'm approaching these NPCs at different angles at different points. They're they're breaking off. And again, as I said, the seamless back and forth with the animation to me is cool because if you have hitches in there or the poses aren't lined up or there's not procedural bits driving other bits, the moment it's noticeable, it breaks you out of that immersion, right? Yeah. And well, I'm looking I'm I'm looking at it's a there's maybe a couple of things I still want to we still want to polish on these, but No, of course. I'm looking at there's a couple of couple of areas, but yeah, we're we're really pleased with the way it is. We can we can always make them better, right? Yeah. I mean, even the environments as well in there. So, you know, you come you we didn't know initially because it weren't quite final with it, but you've got to cater for, you know, people coming from all the various angles that you could do
01:00:42
in those environments. And when you put the line on top of it, there's a lot of work involved. Yeah, I'm aware there's a there's a lot of perfections in this company. Chris Chris being one of them. So, Chris Chris over the hill. Yeah, yeah, he spots it. That's cool. But yeah, I've I've got another video for you if you want to see it. It's basically the dynamic conditions. So, you're showing us how the the magic's done in this one. Yeah, yeah. So, that was a that was all done in first person and that was all done it was all range based. So, you were kind of backing off when you're doing the interrupts. But this kind of show this shows off the uh uh the player, you know, in the in these examples 180. Yeah, I'll show you the video. So, that was his focus trigger realizing he'd seen you and this is the player. Can you see 180?
01:01:31
He's fairly obnoxious. Right. Where was I? He's got the demarker debug markers, aren't you? Yeah. From from his face coming out. Yeah, he's got an interaction trigger around him. That's dynamically scaling depending on what the player is doing. So, when the player 180s, shrinks. When the player return 180s again, he can see it now. Goes back into it, increases, and then he actually picks up the conversation again. Exciting stuff. So, is that marker that's going out? And then if it's that's within proximity, it then triggers certain action, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Cool. So, it's like like a head look and then cut and then resume. Yeah, yeah. So, the player maintains eye contact for say four four four seconds for example's sake, then he picks up conversation. Maybe next. Anyway, we decide to go
01:02:18
drinking at this See what the player is doing it again there. real dump. You see what I mean about maximum trolling though. It is I mean, he's he's he people doing this to test it out. You do it What was that? We spoke As I said, we we tried this out in the office. So, me and Reese were talking about it and I was saying, "Well, let's go and try it out on someone and see what they do." So, you go and engage usually guarder. So, you go and engage them in a conversation then they 180. So, he's just 180ed in the middle of it, just turned away. I think we did it to Carlos a couple of times. No, again, but that's that's really cool. It's cool to see the, you know, it functioning and it function at the level that it is right now. Um it's all about immersion and it's all about us as you're walking around this world wherever you are, being able to have those interactions with those NPCs and have those be
01:03:06
believable. As you said, Phil, not being locked into a conversation or even if you're not locked in and you're free to roam, you know, even going away, like I said, it's going to have some type of consequence potentially, right? Even if it's just you're you're you're annoying the heck out of the guys, right? Or the girl or whoever it is that you're you're abandoning or, you know, um Yeah. or who you're interrupting or so on. Yeah. Well, it on the Idris, there's 80 people to troll. And I'm not it's not about trolling cuz well, so sometimes you'll you'll kick off a conversation, somebody will start rambling about something and you think, "Oh, no, I've not got time for this. I'm moving on." You can do that. The moment we saw this implemented in its first path, and I remember being in a review with it, it literally we were all as as Nick was saying, we're
01:03:55
all laughing. And then we immediately just went, "Okay, the amount of people that are you know, the amount of videos that are going to go online just trolling people, right?" Cuz it is true. Even just with the testing that we do, you see it and the amount of weird wild lines that kind of randomly come in from time to time, you're just like, you know, based off of it's somebody casual or is it somebody that's more, you know, slightly aggressive or like you said, a little bit gruff exterior and so on. So, Yeah. And it's it's evolving all the time as well. You know, cuz at the moment we're implementing gestures, you know, so when you break out Yeah. as it stands, they kind of stand there fairly fairly static. You know, then they hit you with a wild line like, "Oh, where are you going?" But now there'll be a there'll be gestures going in, you know, stuff like this and you know, you know, giving you the finger or
01:04:41
whatever. That's cool. Yeah. So, those will be going in. Yeah, it's just it's just layering on the realism. No, that's cool. That's cool. Big challenge cuz there's a lot of them. Just on the Idris, I think there's about 245 scenes and I think 145 of them require this tech. Yeah, and it isn't just in the Idris. This is, you know, it's everywhere throughout the game. We we really sort of tried to make the player experience of moving around, you know, all the spaces as immersive as possible. Oh, yeah. We're allowing the player to to feel like they're part of the story, you know, as it evolves and everything and it's the first time I've ever seen anything like this in a game. Yeah, and this won't this won't be just look at that. I've got a cat charging across the desk. Come here, you. Um this won't be just this this won't be just the social areas. Um this will be a, you know, FPS scenarios, you know, if you're accompanying a bunch of marines, you know, and you can you can actually leave them as well. They'll have lines
01:05:31
for it. Oh, where the hell are you going? Well, it's one of the advantages when we, you know, when we take the time to build out these systems and build them out to the level that, you know, we're holding ourselves to, which is a fairly high standard. Once that system's mature and in place, we also think about the tool side and the implementation side, right? So, you have that underlying tech, but then we're also building it so these things can be implemented in a fairly efficient way. And that implementation past matures and matures and matures, meaning it's not just you guys said, it's not stuck for one area. Once the tool set's there and once we have a full understanding and edge cases of what breaks and what doesn't, right? That's something then you can you can then propagate everywhere to to the most extent. So, you can have
01:06:18
these same type of interactions regardless of where you're at in Squadron. Yeah. Yeah, really really Yeah, we're getting faster with it now. In the early days, it was it was tough, you know, it was a real challenge. You we'd be pressuring other departments, "Oh, we need we need a an abandon for this and we need an extra abandon there. We need a gesture for this." Yeah. But now if if you plan it right, you know, you can get these in fairly quickly now. That's cool. Awesome. Just just don't upset Carlos by abandoning or running away from him cuz he's he's the architect that's helping you put this together. I know. I know. It's also the the amount of meetings we've had that were reviewing abandons and interrupts and people just would leave the call without saying anything or interrupting each other. Like it got old pretty quick, but it it did happen quite a bit.
01:07:06
No, the yeah. Yeah, too easy for puns, isn't it? Exactly. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you taking the time, Phil. It's really cool to to see progress. No, it's great. I I love showing this stuff off. I love it. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's good and it's it's really good seeing it. So, All right. Okay. Cheers, guys. Awesome. I think we're getting to an end. Absolutely, we are. We're wrapping it up. So, thank you, Nick, for joining us. For helping me out here. It was fun. It was great. Cool. So, I appreciate everyone watching. I always enjoy when we get to show off some more progress and and dive deeper into what we're doing here in Squadron 42. And to close out the show, I wanted to leave you with a a video that our art director for Squadron 42 put together, Nathan Dearsley of
01:07:55
Voscotto. Mhm.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.